Book Review: We Are What We Pretend to Be

(Borrowed from the Jackson Heights Library, along with God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian) Published in 2012, Vonnegut passed away in 2007. An early unpublished short story, Basic Training, and an unfinished novel, called If God Were Alive Today, along with a foreward by the author's daughter Nanette. Both are emblematic of their periods in Vonnegut's writing life. The earlier story is elegantly and soundly written, but a little to neatly tied up at the end. An teen aspiring pianist is sent to live with an authoritarian uncle on the latter's rural farm after his cosmopolitan parents are killed in an auto accident. Hard life lessons are learned, hearts are broken, metaphorical horses and cars play a big part. The young Vonnegut displays an expert craftsmanship in structuring the story. The ending is too tidy with everyone getting their just deserts which seldom occurs outside of fiction.

The second piece shows Vonnegut's progression into the dark satire for which he become renowned in the late 1960s and '70s with Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. The central character is Gil Berman, a stand-up comic like Lenny Bruce and Vonnegut himself who dispenses uncomfortable truths in the form of wisecracks. This fragment is funny and details the comic's encounter with a deranged fan at a performance in Northhampton, Mass. We also are treated to Gil's visits to mental hospitals. A transcript of a session with a female pscyhiatrit reads like a Marx Brother routine. 

The two stories together show Vonnegut's progression from easy satisfying fiction to dangerous cynical commentary. It made me think of the main character in Bluebeard, the artist who gives up realistic portraiture for abstract expression. When his furious wife asks why can't be just paint pretty pictures everyone can understand and relate to (and therefore make more money) instead of the weird challenging, unprofitable material he's been churning out, he replies, "Because that's too easy." It was too easy for Vonnegut to make simple stories. The harder stuff was what he wanted to write.